Can Social Capital Account for Differences in
Political Participation Across American Cities?
∗
Daniel Rubenson
Department of Government
London School of Economics and Political Science
and
D´
epartement de science politique
Universit´
e de Montr´
eal
email: daniel.## email not listed ##
Prepared for delivery at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association
September 1–4, Washington DC. Copyright by the American Political Science Association
Abstract
This paper questions the links between social capital and political engage-
ment, arguing that previous work in the field is characterized by a gap between
the theory of social capital and empirical tests of the effects of the concept. The
paper outlines how social capital might be more fruitfully measured and opera-
tionalized as a community-level attribute and then tests a number of the claims
made about the connection between social capital and individual political en-
gagement by analyzing data on participation in American cities. Preliminary
results indicate that once we control for political institutions there is relatively
little variance in the dependent variable across communities left to be explained
by social capital. That is, much of the evidence for a social capital explanation
of political participation evaporates once we control for institutional and other
contextual factors.
∗
Thanks to Torun Dewan, Keith Dowding, Fran¸
cois G´
elineau and Jouni Kuha for comments
and suggestions. The Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, available at the Roper Center,
was designed by the Sauguaro Seminar at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard
University and funded by the Ford Foundation and a number of Community Foundations. Any
errors are mine.
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